Your work interests me because it seems predicated on exploring not how an experimental aesthetic is consumed, but how it is lived. As a poet, do you embrace the term “experimental”?

I don’t embrace the term but I do embrace the act. I’ve used it, but uncomfortably. I don’t know what an experimental poem is for someone else. Maybe it would be an experiment for someone to write sonnets. Do we call those experimental poems?

For me a poem too easily consumed with no flinging open of any doors is no poem at all. Or at least not one I love…

For me a poem too easily consumed with no flinging open of any doors is no poem at all. Or at least not one I love (for which I can list my own counterexamples). Anyway, what is the term that conveys that? I’ve been reading on a feminist or “liberatory” sublime wherein words, rather than being empty signifiers in random play, are able to accommodate an overflow of meanings. That within the context of certain practices, these terms can exceed their boundaries. So it will be an experiment for me to use the word with this in mind. Regardless, as Derrida said, inadequate though they may be, words do seem to be necessary.

When I saw your book title (made), I immediately thought of the Greek word poema, meaning literally a “made thing,” poemata being the plural. Even if you didn’t have this particular association in mind, it is there in our Western imagination. Don’t you think that piece of etymology enriches all the other made things in the poems?

I hope so! Absolutely, I am working with the thing in hand as artifice. One of the poems states that the book “is only here because you hold it.”

What artistic considerations prompted you to work on prose poems in this collection?

There was a filling that needed to take place. The lineated poem seemed too delicate somehow for the piling up that is happening in the book (on the planet). Also the horizontal orientation of the poems was redolent for me of horizon. Swaths of earthbound views, if contorted through philosophy and compression and expansion of spacetime.